Marsha Blackburn

With early voting approaching in Tennessee's GOP governor's primary race, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn's campaign has prompted a surprising question at the start of July — and it isn't about immigration, Donald Trump or DEI.

It's about whether or not fortune cookies are really Chinese.

On July 7, Blackburn posted a campaign commercial vowing to fend off China from Tennessee. "How hard am I going to crack down on China? Well, here's a clue," says Blackburn before she begins crushing fortune cookies over a Chinese menu.

"Marsha Blackburn will fight to protect Tennessee land from China," the first fortune from the crushed cookies reads.

"Marsha Blackburn will close loopholes and hunt down communists," says the second.

"It doesn't take a fortune cookie to figure it out. Here in Tennessee, we're going to stop communist China and protect Tennessee land," Blackburn says before the sound of a gong closes out the ad.

The melodramatic campaign ad reiterates Blackburn's hardline stance on China, a political perspective she's held and campaigned on since she entered the U.S. Senate in 2019. The main question people seem to be asking about this video is concerning the origin of fortune cookies.

So, where do fortune cookies come from?

Are fortune cookies Chinese?

No, fortune cookies are not of Chinese origin.

Despite their strong association with Chinese restaurants, fortune cookies are not considered a traditional Chinese dessert. According to the History Channel, most historians trace the origin of fortune cookies back to Kyoto, Japan, where they were known as tsujiura senbei.

The traditional fortune cookies likely arrived in the U.S. when Japanese immigrants started to move to Hawaii and California in the 1880s and 1900s.

Who invented the fortune cookie?

The strongest claim for a sole inventorship belongs to Makota Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant and manager of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden, according to the History Channel.

The Tea Garden sourced its cookies from a local bakery called Benkyodo, which claims to have pioneered the vanilla and butter flavoring, the style Blackburn was crushing in her campaign ad.

When did fortune cookies become connected to Chinese culture?

Fortune cookies rarely appear in China, but the reason they are so closely aligned with Chinese culture in the States is because of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.

The mass incarceration disrupted Japanese restaurants and businesses, and it was during this time that Chinese American restaurateurs increasingly started to include the dessert into their menus.

One of the world's largest fortune cookie manufacturers is in Tennessee

Just southeast of Nashville in La Vergne, TN sits one of the world's largest fortune cookie manufacturers, Wonton Food Inc.

Founded in 1973 and headquartered in New York, the company set up shop in Tennessee in 2015, building a $20 million facility.

According to Made In China, a trade resources publication connecting buyers to Chinese suppliers, the food manufacturing plant makes roughly two million fortune cookies a day.

That is 730 million fortune cookies a year.

Peter Burditt covers trending news and service journalism for The Tennessean. Contact him at [email protected]